So I’ve been trying to find a text editor that’s blazing fast with as little features as possible that doesn’t look like it was designed in the '90s.
I would like something that when I click on my files it opens almost instantly and only displays text in a notepad without any buttons tools, or just the bare minimum (like create a new file or something like that). I want this to read .txt files and that’s it, if I’m working on a writing I’d use LibreOffice and if I’m writing some code I’d use Atom.
Learn vim. Its the most versatile, fastest, and pluggable text editor.
Or emacs with a décent thème.
Imo https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs is well polished.
Yeah, OP mentioned using Atom for coding separatedly, but with a configured Neovim setup you could have it all. There’s a learning curve and you kinda have to like configuring things to some degree, but I really think anyone doing a lot of writing of any kind as a hobby and/or at work ought to give Neovim a fair shot.
Vim is absolutely the right answer. No visual interface at all and easy to customize aesthetically by putting a few lines into .vimrc.
Learning curve: There is one, but it really isn’t that bad. Read a guide first because minimalist is not the same as instinctive. If you learn a bit about modes and specific commands before you get started, Vim is way easier to use than the hype would lead you to believe.
Of course, OP wants something without a lot of features. Vim has tons of features, although none of Vim’s advanced features are noticeable unless you read through :help or learn some extra commands. If you just learn basic navigation, mode-shifting, and HOW TO SAVE/EXIT, then you probably won’t find a more minimalist text editing experience. Except for ed.
I wish this were libre so I could play it till the end and learn Vim.
I just used vimtutor to learn, but this seems more fun
Hmm, so if it only displays text, no other UI elements, then what about it could even look like it was designed in the 90s? Or do you just want an editor that can display variable-width font?
nano
Maybe https://xi-editor.io, or https://github.com/linuxmint/xed, or also https://kakoune.org
I checked the GUIs for Xi (I love the idea of it being built upon Rust) but they all seem to be dead except for Tau which has more shit than Gedit (the one I’m using now), same goes with Xed and I think Kakoune is a terminal based text editor.
Xed is not really dead at all. I use it instead of gedit.
GNU nano can’t be not mentioned here, it’s command line only
What about Mousepad or Featherpad? Gedit, Pluma, Geany are a little more featured but still good and snappy. Cudatext is like a mix of simple editor and Atom-like code editor. But it’s one of the faster editors I’ve used.
I’m using Gedit now, it has another name on Flathub I think, but all the rest seem too bloated, full with buttons and shit, I’d basically like to have text displayed as minimalist as possible.
This is how it looks now, but if I could get something with less, without, or that those buttons on the title bar disappear when I’m not using it would be perfect (Foliate does this for e-books, but it’s too slow for .txt files).
Kate, maybe.
You can try a few of these 1954 editors here: https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?EditorIndex
Or a few of these I listed here: https://wiki.tilde.fun/dev/editor/start
I would like something that when I click on my files it opens almost instantly and only displays text in a notepad without any buttons tools, or just the bare minimum
Mousepad is created for exactly that purpose, if you liked GTK. I think the Qt equivalent would be Featherpad.
What desktop environment do you use? Kate is pretty fast on my system and it’s a full-blown IDE. The only super slow editors I know are Electron-based like Atom. Why not use vscodium instead of Atom btw? As far as I knew Atom got left behind a bit when Microsoft bought Github.
Kate, maybe.
